Breach
by chaos child
Summary: A realspace breach deep in the ocean of a human planet sparks a horrific chain of events and an immortal girl is caught in a plan by chaos itself. Rating for violenceswearing.
1. Prologue

I do not own warhammer 40k in any way at all, it all belongs to Games Workshop, praise be to them battle brother.

The cold dark plains of Malor III were bathed in the blue luminescence of the planet's twin moons, the movement of small animals could be heard and a keen observer would have spied two figures sitting cross-legged on the dry earth. One was female and no older than twenty standard years, the other's age was indistinguishable, for he had a heavily augmented face, sporting mechanical eyes and an armoured skull devoid of hair.

"Are you sure you can feel it?" he asked in a strangely human voice considering the extent of his facial bionics.

"Well..I suppose I could be wrong"

"We have to be sure" His tone was somewhat authoritative "There can be no mistakes, especially at a time like this, you understand that?"

She knew what he meant by those last words but she didn't want to think about it. It was too terrifying to consider that even as they spoke Abaddon, scourge of the Imperium and champion of Chaos was waging his thirteenth black crusade across the Cadian sector. She shuddered at the memory of Abaddon, he was eight feet tall and taller still when encased in his suit of terminator armour. He bled hatred and malice into the air around him and no mortal had yet been able to hold his gaze. She could remember his wrath and his perverse joy, his unholy mental link to the daemon sword he always carried with him. His bellowing laugh and his roar of rage echoed in her mind as she tried to forget. 

She was always trying to forget, some had told her to be proud of her memories because she had seen more of the darkness in this galaxy than even some of the most experienced Inquisitors. She found it impossible to be proud of what she had seen, the people she had lost and the places she had seen fall were too many to count anymore. 

' Melennia of experience bound in the body of a 19 year old.' that was what she had been called before, it made her feel small, as if all she was not the one who had witnessed her memories but she had stolen them from another. Sometimes she wished she had stolen them, wished she hadn't been there.

She lay back on the grass and stared up at the starry blanket of the night sky, it seemed so tranquil, so serene, so much unlike the madness and violence that constantly washed through it.

***

Half a world away, buried deep in an ocean trench, listening station B11-C/6 was awash with blood.

Once more the corridors echoed with human voices talking in hushed tones, their owners ears straining to pick up the gentle clicking against the plasteel flooring. Jacob crouched behind a radio console and calmly reloaded his laspistol, hands working through motions perfected by years of combat experience. He stood and peered over the top of his hiding place. The others had also found cover, but they were all cowering in fear, bodies shaking in terror as they waited to be found by the beasts that now inhabited the listening post. He cast a glance at the doorway, seeing it was clear and making his decision. 

His sprang from his hiding place and started to sprint even as the plan formed in his mind. If he could reach the room that housed the short-range vox units he could at least warn the planetary governor and raise the alarm, so that his death would not be completely meaningless. He bounded out of the room and down the corridor. He tried to ignore the animal-like growls that rose from rooms that he passed, after a short while he could hear their hooves beating down on the floor after him. He knew he could never outrun them, and he prayed to the God-emperor that he could make it to the vox in time. 

As he rounded the final corner and flung himself into the room he could hear the heavy breathing from behind him, he pulled the receiver from the vox and keyed in to central command on the emergency frequency.

"This is listening post B11-C/6" his voice shook with fear "We have a breach in realspace, activate counter.."

But Jacob never got to finish that sentence, he felt daemon talons rip through his unprotected body and as they did his soul went with them.

***

Please R&R, I'm probably going to continue this because I just want to write it but you better review anyway otherwise I might lose heart and give up.


	2. A thousand voices

I do not own warhammer 40k in any way at all, it all belongs to Games Workshop, praise be to them battle brother.

Some one better get their ass in gear and review this, please, see I'm asking nicely so you better do so otherwise father Nurgle will do nasty things to you.

Sarah wondered if Benz had been right, she had sat with him out on the plains for most of the night discussing what had happened to bring her to this planet. She had got bored with it after a while, but the old priest had insisted that it was important for both of them to know all of the details. He had always believed the God-emperor himself somehow guided them but she just thought it was all bad luck.

It was bad luck that she was what she was, immortal.

Immortality, she mused to her self, is not all its cracked up to be. Madmen across the galaxy strove for daemonhood, every day the Imperial nobility would buy new methods and drugs to keep their fragile hold on life, the supreme tech-priests of Mars made themselves into unaging beings of metal. But when, deep down you are still a normal human immortality is painful.

Sarah was lying on the bed in the small apartment they had rented in the planet's capital city, Ne-tay. She wondered if she really had felt the vibrations in the warp that she thought she had. On the off chance that they were real she had insisted they stay at least a little longer on this planet. Just to see, she told herself.

In truth she wasn't sure how accurate her powers were, she had no one else to compare them to. Once she had met another of her kind, he was very different from her, he never having come to terms with the burden of being immortal. She had known him only for a very short time, the imperial authorities had wanted him. She had never bothered to ask why, sometimes she wished she had.

She got up and walked bare footed across the floor to the door of her room, It had become a habit of hers to walk barefoot whenever she could, it kept her in psychical contact with the ground, indoors it was pointless as the ground was kept away by three floors of apartments. She still did it though.

She walked carefully to avoid waking Benz, he would grumble if she did, he complained at few things, and being woken up by her in the middle of the night was one. She did it often enough, she never slept for very long. She stopped and looked down at Benz, asleep in a chair, hands folded neatly on his lap. She wondered if he ever found her attractive, she had asked him once, just to embarrass him, he had never replied. She wondered if she was at all attractive.

This thought suddenly took complete priority with her, as random thoughts often did. Benz said it had nothing to do with being immortal, it was just her. She trod softly over to the full-length mirror that was on one of the walls and looked at her reflection.

She had long flame-red hair and rather pale skin, her skin was always like that, no amount of sunlight could change that now. She looked carefully at her figure, young and shapely, but by no means voluptuous, the figure of a nineteen-year-old woman, the age she had been when it happened. At that thought she turned away from the mirror, not wanting to think about it.

As she carefully walked back to her room, she felt it, slight at first, but more powerful by the second, a buzzing in her head, like a thousand voices at once screaming in torment. Then as it reached a peak it stopped, she knew what that meant.

Benz wouldn't mind being woken about this.

***

In the administrative chamber of the Imperial governor all hell was breaking lose as twelve people tried to all voice their opinion at once.

"Send a search party"

"Alert the Inquisition!"

"Virus bomb the whole damn thing!"

Max sat at his desk, massaging his temples. Let them fight it out, he thought, let them argue all they want. He knew why they argued, it was for power and the prestige that would be won for finding the right solution. They would happily sit around and argue like children vying for a parent's attention while there was a message bearing the words "realspace breach". That was the way of Imperial politics and it had been that way since the end of the great crusade. Max sighed and stood up, usually he would allow this to continue, it was healthy for them and kept them happy, but under theses circumstances he could not allow this pointless bickering to continue.

"Silence!" he roared

The room instantly fell quiet, he was surprised at himself, he had been a Colonel in the Imperial Guard and he still had it in him, none of the others were ready for this outburst, none of them had off-world military experience like he had.

"Gentlemen" he began with forced politeness "We have a major situation and we will follow Imperial protocol in this matter"

One of the more junior members of the council looked as if he was bursting to say something, he was young and fresh out of education realised Max. Then something hit him, none of these men really knew what they might be facing in the coming days. None of them had ever been off world and they had certainly never experienced the pure horror of a realspace breach.

Max had, he had been planetside when chaos marines had summoned Daemons during a war on a planet he wished to forget about. He had seen chaos before and he had fought in the battles against them, he remembered the beating of hooves on hard, dry ground as the Guard's finest battle tanks had been ripped apart as if they were paper, he knew what it felt like to face a Daemon up close, the one he had shot, its snarling bestial face forever imprinted on his memory.

He shook himself out of his memories he did not wish to have to find that the council was bickering again, this is going to be a long night he thought.

***

Please please please review this, I'm begging you. If that doesn't work then you'll have father Nurgle to answer to.


	3. Trapped in the calm before the storm

I do not own warhammer 40k in any way at all, it all belongs to Games Workshop, praise be to them battle brother. But as this is a fanfiction site I doubt I'm going to get sued. ( i.e. please don't sue me because I'm poor)

Thanks for all the reviews. Sorry whoever asked, but I don't know what a sensei is, I made Sarah up all on my own.

Yes I know I've taken ages to update this. But it's not my fault. Ages ago I got a new laptop and I couldn't access any secure sites (e.g. FF.net) but its finally fixed and I can get updating my various stories.

On with the show....

***

Benz sat waiting, he was very used to waiting. Sarah had woken him in the night and told him of her vision, he had dug into their supplies and found weapons for them both, he had organised everything they needed and packed it into a couple of bags. Experience told him that having things ready to leave at a moments notice greatly reduced the chance of having to fight his way out. 

Sarah had gone to the city's spaceport, looking for a ship going off world, neither of them wanted to be around when the fighting started, Benz least of all. Sarah's immortal body could take most things the galaxy could throw at it, but Benz was only human, not a particularly tough human either. His augmented eyes gave him extremely good eyesight, better than any natural eyes, his metallic head could take a bullet but the rest of him was human, pure and simple human flesh and blood.

He offered up a prayer to the God-emperor by reflex as his thoughts wondered what would happen if they didn't manage to get of Mallor II in time. He had never been on a planet with a warp breach of the magnitude Sarah's vision had suggested.

Warp breach, he had heard a number of names for it. He had seen the largest of its kind. The eye of terror, ocularis terriblus, light years across it could bee seen for entire sub-sector in the sky of every planet, it had been there as long as all human records indicated and only the most classified of inquisition reports dared to hint otherwise.

He was broken out of his revere by the sound of Sarah returning, she looked serious and pale, but she was always pale.

He raised his eyebrows questioningly. She shook her head.

"We're not going anywhere." she said. "They've cancelled all warp-capable ships, we could get off world but not out of the system and the only other planet here is a penal colony" She muttered the words quietly, apology almost creeping into her voice.

He reached out and put his hand on her shoulder, he didn't quite understand why she got like this after a vision, but he knew how to help.

"Its not your fault" He said

She just looked at him, eyes betraying age beyond his own, he shifted uncomfortably in the chair. That stare was always frightening, it was her way of reminding him how much more she knew about the galaxy than he did.

***

Everything had gone wrong since the ritual, Corbilus knew that much.

The ritual was meant to honour the gods, ask them for their power and knowledge, but they had responded from the warp with more force than was asked for. The daemons had ripped through the skin of reality and killed indiscriminately, cultists and servants of the corpse-god alike.

Now Corbilus cowered in a corner, wishing he had some way out of this place, the daemons had destroyed all of the submersibles, leaving the humans trapped in listening post B11-C/6. Corbilus had no one to pray to, he had long abandoned the teachings of the pitiful corpse-god, and now it seemed the gods of chaos had turned on him.

He knew they were fickle deities at best, if such a human expression could be used to describe gods. Only a few months ago a member of the cult had been 'blessed' with cloven hooves instead of feet, it hadn't taken long for his mutation to be seen by people outside the cult, he had been mobbed by the inhabitants of the listening post and burnt alive. That was the fate of all heretics and traitors, to be submitted to the emperor's 'mercy'.

Corbilus's breathing was laboured and his lungs threatened to stop working as he heard the gentle clicking of hooves on metal, he struggled to make himself seem as small as possible. Deep down he knew it wouldn't make any difference, his time in the cult had thought him that daemons saw souls, not bodies.

He could smell it now, blood and charcoal, like a body set on fire. He felt a wave of nausea hit him as the stench assaulted his nostrils. He clawed at the walls like a trapped animal, all sanity leaving him as the clicking got louder. He screwed up his eyes and started to cry as felt heat radiating from behind him accompanied by deep, rumbling breaths. His whole body paralysed as he felt something grab his arm and pull him to his feet. He could not help but open his eyes as he stumbled to a standing position.

It was a vision of hell, easily eight feet tall, the smell raping his nostrils. Skin blood red and glistening, muscles rippling beneath. Its face threatened to drive him insane, no forehead, bulging maddened eyes, sunken bat-like nose and a maw full of irregular gnashing teeth.

His mind steadied itself just enough to ask ÔWhy hasn't it killed me yet?

***

The tactical screen was huge, it filled an entire room. Much to his annoyance, Max had no idea how to operate it alone. He sat at a long table with General Lavacith, who was in control of the planetary defence forces and his senior Logicator, Erat, who was operating the screen and explaining the various forces at Max's disposal.

Max had got through an entire pack of cigars and was on his second. The number of things that could go wrong were simply unbelievable. What made it worse is that the General didn't understand the conditions involved with a warp breach and Erat was not explaining them very well either.

"That is just unsound." The General's voice filtered into Max's mind. "By thinning our forces like that we will have no way to supply them all." He was arguing with Erat.

"Would you prefer Deamons be allowed to run amok anywhere they please?" Erat retorted.

"Wha...." the General was confused for a moment. "The won't be running amok you idiot, because our forces will stop them as they emerge from the sea. If the.....what did you call it Sir?" the General paused and looked to Max.

"Realspace breach." He said, mind numbing at this pointless argument.

The General continued. "Yes, if this... realspace breach is underwater then the deamonic army will have to emerge from the sea.

"I don't think you quite understand" Erat's tone of voice was spiked with contempt. "The deamons will.....".

"Don't you dare tell me I don't understand!! You pathetic schemer, I am a General and if you...." Now it was the General's turn to be cut off.

Max rose sharply to his feet. He wondered if him having to do this twice in as so many hours was a reflection of how stupid his staff were.

"Both of you shut the fuck up." he shouted. "Now, General, allow me to explain" Max strode over to the tactical screen.

"Put it back to the original view please Erat." He asked. Erat pressed one of the buttons on the pad before him and the screen returned to showing a blank view of Mallor III's surface. Max rummaged in his cloak for a pen. He found one and drew a circle on the board where listening station B11-C/6 probably was. Erat looked indignant at Max drawing on the screen, but he kept silent.

"Right General, the breach is here, yes?" Max spoke in a patronising tone, he wanted the General to really understand the seriousness of the situation.

The General nodded.

"Good. Now it doesn't matter where the breach is in the sea. Because deamons aren't stopped by land mass. They are not affected by the water. They will most probably bore through coastlines straight for cities. They now infect the planet's water supply so we can expect thousands of chaos-riddled towns within hours. They won't just come from the sea either. That breach means they can manifest anywhere. They can come right into Ne-tay to kill and rape women and children." Max finished his angry rant at the General, who sat stunned.

"Sir.....I" He began.

"No" said Max "I don't want explanations and bootlicking. I want men out there now! I want regular patrols of every street in every city, I want men listening to seismic activity, I want company psychics watching the warp. I want everything done RIGHT THE FUCK NOW!!

The General stood up, and bowed his head to Max.

"Yes sir, right away." He was flustered by Max and hurried out the door.

Max rounded on Erat.

"Erat, go to the astropathic chambers and ask them to send an a-class repeating distress signal." Max knew some of the other systems nearby would respond. What he didn't know was that a system listed as dead housed an Inquisition fortress.

The signal would reach there first before it reached any other planets.

Max sighed as Erat rushed to obey, he needed a stiff drink.


End file.
